We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. It is not a technical issue. This morning, Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 22 of our most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware. We were very surprised by this. We have a long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us. Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives.

We have been in contact with Microsoft today. They claim that their intent is to only filter out the known bad hostnames in each seized domain, while continuing to allow the good hostnames to resolve. However, this is not happening. Apparently, the Microsoft infrastructure is not able to handle the billions of queries from our customers. Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft’s attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors.

That was exactly my point, had they represented in court that they were going to impact millions of legitimate domain users in order to twart a handful of malware distributers, I doubt the court would have awarded them the order to take control of the domains.

To me they have misrepresented their intentions and the impact they would cause, and should pay for their lies to the court, and misuse of the domains. Imagine what would happen if someone took microsoft.com offline with one of these actions.

Personally, now that I know what happened it took me 5 minutes to mitigate microsofts criminal act of removing MY DNS host name, and I've lost maybe 10 hours of mail (due to the loss of the DNS name in SPF/DMARC) but there will be many businesses that lose a lot more including loss of business and money due to this.

No doubt the malware dispensers were not slowed down 1 little bit either!

To me they have misrepresented their intentions and the impact they would cause, and should pay for their lies to the court, and misuse of the domains. Imagine what would happen if someone took microsoft.com offline with one of these actions.

Do you know they represented their intentions in court? Do you know what was in the documents Microsoft used to get this court order?

I admit I'm not well versed on the laws pertaining to this type of action, but it sure smells illegal to me. No.IP was not notified before court action was taken? Since when do corporations have the right to do whatever they want because they have money & politicians in their pockets? Oh, that's why.

Since hearing about this I've jumped to FreeDNS. Upside is picking from a giant pool of domains, some owned by the guy running the service, but most owned by other users. Plus it does away with the 30 day nag that no-ip makes you do.

Doesn't help those with paid accounts but could be something to look into if you're looking for another free DDNS provider.

I'd say it's a fair estimate, considering how popular no-ip has been in past years.

Moreover, I'd like to know how Microsoft have the right to say "We want to take the property of another company because it's been misused". If something is ceased, surely it should go to the government, not another company.

To be fair, the registered owner of the domain is responsible for the content on the main domain and all subdomains, Vitalwerks should be grateful Microsoft only want to filter out malicious content rather than getting the entire domains terminated. That said, if their blog post can be believed and Microsoft didn't first contact Vitalwerks to try and resolve the issue before taking them to court it was a poor move.

There should definitely be a review process put into place to prevent this from happening. Microsoft could have just have asked politely for No-IP to check the domains and remove the infected ones instead of taking the entire thing down.